A searching sequel to Alison Bechdel's landmark graphic memoir

Alison Bechdel's 2006 ­graphic memoir, Fun Home, was a sui generis work that packed more than seemed ­humanly ­possible into its ­vivid ­imagery. That volume ­enjoyed huge advan­tages over its sequel, Are You My ­Mother? (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): Her childhood home, a meticulously restored ­Victorian, made a spectacularly apt backdrop for the ­story of Bechdel's father's ­closeted homo­sexuality, her parents' loveless marriage, and the drama of her own lesbian ­coming-of-age. And her father was no ­longer around to kibitz or complain.

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What is astonishing about Bechdel's new book is how deeply and vividly it plunges us into her epic struggle to come to terms with her very-much-alive-and-kicking mother, who abruptly told her daughter one night that she was too old to be kissed good night (she was seven). Are You My Mother? offers an improbably profound master class in how to live an examined life—­seeing clear the problems and challenges posed by primary relationships and ­personal experience and employing literature, memoir, psychoanalytic writings, even dream imagery to forge an understanding of our particular existence. In doing so—to a degree that is problematically self-absorbed but also fully aware of that fact—Bechdel demonstrates powerfully how we might go about finding meaning in our lives, as she has done, through a freewheeling inquiry into how we are put together. It is, if anything, more moving and illuminating than Fun Home.